SEDITION IN INDIA.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLI, Issue 226, 24 September 1907, Page 6

SEDITION IN INDIA.

(The Times, Thursday, July 11.)

By prosecuting two of the mpst active agents of the Swadeshi move-, ment in Bengal the Government of India are striking at one of the most dangerous developments of sedition in that portion of the peninsula. The agitation puts on many forms. There' is the Press campaign conducted by newspapers like the Bande Mataram, the Calcutta Yugantar, and other organs from which our special correspondent sent us some striking extracts the other day. There are the public meetings at which Mr Chandra Bepin Pal and his like assure immature native students that we are very much afraid of them, and exhort them openly to defy the law and,to " give their lives for their country." There are the " beggards and fakirs in disguise " who are engaged, the Yugantar boasts, in trying to debauch the native army. There are the emissaries who go about from village to village in the Punjab and whisper to the ignorant peasants that the Feringhees are poisoning the wells and spreading the plague. There are doubtless other agencies at work to fan discontent and, if possible, to provoke violence. But of all the weapons which the wirepullers and directors of the movement have' devised, none has proved more effective than the trade boycott in Eastern Bengal. That has led straight to the great object- in view. It has brought about open and audacious acts of lawlessness, and it has disturbed the minds of large classes of the population. The reason is quite simple. It imperils the livelihood of numbers of Mahomedan traders, shopkeepers, and pedlars, and drives them into conflict with their Hindu neighbours. The I trade in English goods in Eastern Bengal is chiefly in Mahomedan hands. The heads of the seditious conspiracy have* decreed that no British goods shall be bought and sold. They can, and do, coerce their fellow-Hindus, by the subtle and irresistible machinery of the religions boycott. The most loyal and peaceable of Hindus who, for example, has children of a marriageable age, cannot reasonably be expected^lo withstand the threat which these high-caste Brahknins hang over him—that, if he does not act. with them, he will find no suitable matches for his children- —in other words, no way of discharging that first, of 'hip moral and religious obligations, the continuance of his family. But this threat has from its nature no terrors for the Mahomedans. Other engines are needed to coerce them, and other engines have been found;. They have been found in the organisation of Uie so-called "National Volunteers." Thin body is chiefly recruited from the Hindu students of the Government and. State-aided colleges and schools, who have been enrolled, instructed, and drilled with" the connivance and, in some instances, under the orders of their teachers. Its principal business so faz", has been to enforce the "un written law " emanating from the Cal cutta conspirators upon recalcitrant Mahomedans. This has been done on the regular Irish model, first by intimidation, and, where intimidation has failed, ~hy violence, outrage, and riot. Where the victims have resisted and the police have—or have notintervened," the authors of the whole trouble have turned round upon the Government and accused them of inciting one class of the people of India against another. It is high time to exert all the powers of the law to suppress this evil, and to supplement those powers to whatever extent may be needful, should they prove to be inadequate.